DETOUR: Blu-ray (PRC, 1945) Criterion Collection

The back of Paramount Pictures butts up against the ‘Hollywood Forever’ cemetery whose sordid history has left some to speculate its grounds are haunted by ghosts of the famous dearly departed. I’ll bet most people living outside of Hollywood did not know that. But director, Edgar G. Ulmer, knew too well this cruel and seedy side of Tinsel Town, having come to its fabled grounds during the silent era, direct from Vienna, and, his apprenticeship with Max Reinhardt, only to be given one brief shining opportunity to direct an A-budget horror film. The Black Cat (1934) was made by Ulmer at Universal after he endured a forgettable spate of projects, making 2-reel silent westerns for his first mentor, William Wyler. Carle Laemmle Sr., Universal’s mogul, had faith in Ulmer before screening The Black Cat. Afterwards, Laemmle thought Ulmer had betrayed the studio’s edicts to make a highly experimental film he otherwise never would have green-lit. Laemmle was also not kosher with Ulmer carrying on an affair with Shirley Castle; the wife of his beloved nephew, Max Alexander. So, what had begun as promise itself for Ulmer, quickly evaporated into a nondescript and uncertain future; ousted from Universal, and blacklisted from working at any of the other A-list movie companies, directing on-the-fly D-listed shorts, working under the most stringent budgets and shooting schedules at every and any poverty row studio that would have him. 

Ulmer’s one advantageous moment, 1945’s Detour, is thus a picture that, in its own time, though popular, still never managed to garner Ulmer the kind of critical respect he had striven to attain since leaving Vienna. In his own lifetime, both the picture and Ulmer would remain underappreciated and nearly forgotten, despite Detour steadily taking on a life of its own in the mid-seventies, and, ever since, growing in reputation as a bona fide noir classic, above and apart from the usual quota of B-grade quickies. Detour remains the Citizen Kane of all paranoiac noir classics – a moody masterpiece, shot by cinematographer, Benjamin H. Kline with near nobodies to headline, three threadbare sets, one sleek automobile, a lone exterior, and, some incredibly unstable rear projection, subbing in for Los Angeles. There are far more accomplished noir pictures out there, afforded the high-key-lit treatment, with expensive costumes and props, and an A-list roster of Hollywood’s heavy-hitters to gloss and glam-up the scenery. But none typify man’s self-inflicted anxiety or self-loathing so completely as Detour.

Subliminally, Ulmer was likely cribbing from his own circumstance. He also claimed to have shot Detour in just six days. The original shooting script counts fourteen. But co-star, Ann Savage recounts in her biography that Detour was made over three, six-day weeks, with additional retakes and four more days on location in the desert outside of Lancaster, California. Whatever the truth, Detour was hardly afforded either a lavish budget or enough time to have yielded such impressive results, more so when one stops to consider the movie’s budget hovered at just under $100,000. Even in 1945, this was considered ‘bottom feeder’ dirt cheap.  

Ah, but Detour is immensely blessed to have Ulmer at its helm, distilling screenwriter, Martin Goldsmith’s far more ambitious screenplay, based on his novel, into a skeletal road picture in which no scene is over-produced, and no strip of dialogue is wasted; the movie’s sparsity, amplified by Leo Erdody’s underscore. Erdody lends sympathetic strains to our introduction of Ann Savage’s hitchhiking harridan, Vera, in very stark contrast to her tart-mouthed and venomous attitude toward the picture’s antihero, Al Roberts (Tom Neal). Detour is essentially the tale of a frustrated artist, denied his ambitions for a suitable career as a concert pianist, and, the love of his life, Sue Harvey (Claudia Drake), the only woman on his mind, despite the fact she barely has his best interests at heart. Even so, Sue is a saint compared to Vera – the mousy, gritted-teeth viper, Al decides to help. As they say, ‘No good deed goes unpunished!’ Reportedly, to instantly convey the repellent nature of this female hitchhiker, Ulmer instructed the makeup department to have Savage’s hair streaked with cold cream to make it greasy – and then, sprinkle sand and dust, to further convey the harshness in Vera’s character – or lack thereof.

Made for PRC (Producers Releasing Corporation), Detour’s aspirations were merely to make money; just another of the fledgling’s B-grade fodder, with a C-grade script and D-listed nobodies, vying for their chance in the picture-making biz. That it proved a winner, in spite of its pedigree, is a tribute to Ulmer, who clearly had an invested interest to make a better movie than anyone might have anticipated.  Working under a tight budget, Ulmer forwent continuity in favor of telling a good story, in one egregious example, not even having the time to ‘flip’ the negative. Instead, Al’s trek across the desert appears to have been shot in the U.K. – traffic, traveling on the wrong side of the road, and, in the wrong direction, going east instead of west. Detour is a happy accident in the best sense; its ‘stars’ giving the picture their all. Indeed, headliner, Tom Neal, an amateur boxer with an impressive winning streak in the ring (he lost only 3 out of 34 bouts), and who appeared regularly, if always in minor roles, in some A-list pictures at Universal until an altercation in 1951, in which he severely pummeled one-time leading man, Franchot Tone in the front yard of his fiancée, Barbara Payton, would see his career prospects dry up virtually overnight thereafter.

And although Neal got the girl in real life, as Payton clearly favored him over Tone, it proved a shallow victory. The couple separated two years later. Neal’s later life was as marred by another perplexedly dark chapter - another relationship with Vegas receptionist, Gale Bennett, who was found dead in the couple’s apartment of a fatal gunshot to the head. Neal, who testified at trial to ‘accidentally’ shooting his wife during a struggle, served six years for involuntary manslaughter, and would die of heart failure a scant seven months after his release from prison. In hindsight, eerily so, much of this backstory seems to be foreshadowed in Neal’s Detour alter ego, Al Roberts – dumping the lifeless remains of one Charles Haskell, Jr. (Edmund MacDonald) in the desert after he believes the old pill-popping bugger has died, then later, inadvertently strangling Vera to death by tugging on a telephone cord under a locked door, quite unaware the other end has become entangled around her neck as she lays on the bed, about to telephone the police.  Whatever smidgen of self-respect Al might have had when he departed New York for the coast, he loses after his ill-fated introduction to the good-natured Haskell – a professional sports enthusiast and gambler who elects to give Al a ride from Arizona to L.A. Too bad for Al, Haskell’s chronic health problems cause him to suffer a stroke en route. Unaware anything is wrong at first, Al realizes he has a potential corpse riding shotgun only after an impromptu thunderstorm fails to awaken Haskell in the passenger seat of his convertible.

Knowing how things will look to the police, Al ditches Haskell’s unconscious body in the underbrush, steals his identity, clothes and car, and plots to drive all day and night to reach his beloved Sue, gone on ahead to forge her career as a nightclub singer cum movie star. As things did not exactly pan out for Sue, she is only too happy to entertain notions of becoming Al’s wife once he gets into town. But penniless and proud, Al takes up hitchhiking to cross the country; Ulmer, economically depicting most of his cross-country sojourn with shadowy feet superimposed across a map of the U.S. After ditching Haskell, Al makes his one truly fatal mistake – picking up fellow hitcher, Vera along the side of the road. Seems Vera knew Haskell when…and well – too well. As Al is now driving Haskell’s flashy car, and passing off Haskell’s I.D. as his own, she bristly accuses Al of murdering Haskell to assume his identity. Unable to disentangle this presumption from the truth, Al is forced to play along with Vera’s plan to get to L.A. and split whatever money they can get for his car, fifty-fifty. Vera is a despicable human being – a grotesque, poured into a tight-fitted sweater, with windswept tresses that smell of day-old sweat, and, possessing the moral compass of a serial gold digger, out for all she can get. While Al fantasizes about being reunited with Sue once he and Vera split, Vera buys a local paper. It seems Haskell did not die in the desert. After suffering an aneurysm, he was discovered by police and hurried to a nearby hospital where he is expected to die.

The paper suggests Haskell’s family is desperate to contact his estranged son with news he will soon inherit his father’s considerable holdings. So, Vera elects not to sell the car or rid herself of Al, whom she can barely tolerate. No, Vera wants Al to play the part of Haskell Jr. and claim the inheritance for himself, then split it with her. Only Al has more than a modicum of decency left in him. He made a wrong move – a detour, back there in the desert, and it has cost him everything. So, Al refuses to play Vera’s game. At one point, Al calls Vera’s bluff. He tells her if she is serious, she can call the police. He will implicate her in Haskell’s demise and they will both hang for it. Only, Al has underestimated the depth of Vera’s vial vengeance. As she rushes off with the telephone, locking herself in the bedroom, Al, unaware the lengthy cord is loosely wrapped around Vera’s neck, grabs hold on the other end and begins to violently tug, hoping to prevent Vera from going through with the phone call. Instead, the cord tightens around Vera’s neck, strangling her to death. Too late, Al breaks down the bedroom door, discovering Vera’s body splayed across the bed. Who will believe him now? Two deaths - both accidental, each involving him. No, he can never go back to Sue now. He can’t go to the authorities either. Nor can he ever go home to New York or stay in L.A. as there are too many bystanders who saw him with Haskell or Vera, and very likely to identify him as their killer. In his penultimate moments of self-despair, we find Al lumbering down a darkened desert road, mourning the loss of his freedom, moments before a police cruiser pulls alongside to pick him up.  

While Detour enjoyed some notoriety upon its initial release, it was hardly a sleeper hit; nor did it do much for Ulmer’s reputation in pictures. Throughout the fifties and sixties, Detour periodically cropped up as late-night filler on TV. But then, in the mid-seventies, Detour began to acquire a reputation; in fact, redefined as something of the template by which all other noirs might be judged and compared. This latter-age admiration is somewhat odd, not because Detour is undeserving of as much (at barely an hour and nine minutes, it is a wonder of screen story-telling economy). Even so, Detour does not follow many of the conventions generally associated with the ‘noir’ style. Chiefly, it foregoes the usual detective/gumshoe antihero in favor of following the misguided and badly bungled life choices made by this down and out, self-pitying dupe. And certainly, Ann Savage’s embittered, ruthless and de-glamorized harpy can hardly be lumped together with the otherwise trademarked femme fatales, made popular by the likes of Barbara Stanwyck (Double Indemnity, 1944), Gene Tierney (Leave Her to Heaven, 1945), Rita Hayworth (Gilda, 1946) or Lana Turner (The Postman Always Rights Twice, 1946). Nevertheless, Detour is skillfully manufactured, darkly disturbing melodrama, Ulmer illustrating a rawer than anticipated human tragedy in which our self-professed innocent suffers from ever more detrimental bouts of crippling guilt.  

Detour has been the subject of an ambitious restoration effort, spanning nearly ten-long-years in search of suitable elements to begin the process. As the original camera negative was lost long ago, Criterion’s new to Blu has been derived from a meticulous 4K restoration of a highly complex reconstruction, incorporating footage from multiple sources, including a nitrate fine grain housed at the Cinémathèque royale de Belgique. For more on the technological hurdles encountered to resurrect Detour from oblivion, those interested should view one of the extras on Criterion’s new Blu-ray where preservationists, Mike Pogorzelski and Heather Linville discuss the Herculean challenge in bringing Detour back from the dead. There is nothing to match the overall clarity and depth of contrast exhibited on this newly minted Blu-ray. It puts all previous DVD incarnations of Detour to shame. The gray scale shows off a lot of detail and some film grain looking very indigenous to its source, while age-related artifacts have been removed, and image stabilization, applied for a smooth, film-like presentation that will surely not disappoint.  

That said, there is still some residual softness, intermittent, but creeping in from the peripheries of the screen, although this may be due to PRC’s quick n’ dirty poverty row production assembly, less than good camera equipment used to photograph the movie, and/or, age-related deterioration, not salvageable, even with digital tools at the restorationist’s disposal. Whatever the case, this 1080p transfer looks great and far better than I expected. Criterion gives us a 1.0 PCM mono audio, adequate and free of age-related hiss and pop. For Criterion, extras are a tad on the light side. The 2004 documentary, Edgar G. Ulmer: The Man Off-Screen, is the best of the lot – offering a fairly comprehensive look back at Ulmer’s life and career, with commentary from Ann Savage, and, filmmakers, Roger Corman, Joe Dante, and Wim Wenders. We also get an exclusive interview with noted film scholar, Noah Isenberg discussing Ulmer. Plus, there is the aforementioned restoration featurette, and, a booklet essay by Robert Polito. Bottom line: Detour is a gripping, gritty, and well-grounded noir melodrama, relying on Ulmer and his cast to sell cheaply but aim high in their expectations. They admirably succeed. Detour belongs on everyone’s top shelf. Highly recommended!

FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)

4

VIDEO/AUDIO

4

EXTRAS

3